As Mr Natural sez, “It don’t mean shit.”

Actually, I’m doing quite well, I feel wistful and philosophical, but I’m quite happy. At this point in my life the biggest thing I worry about is my health, and my wife’s, but who doesn’t at our age? And besides, we’re both feeling pretty good right now. After six years of retirement I don’t feel adrift or useless. In fact, I am quite content with my domestic routine. I am at peace.

All those things I planned to do, embark on a program of study and reading, learning a foreign language, start a second career or a novel, throw myself again into an old hobby (or maybe start a new one), have not come to pass. And its not because I can’t, its because I don’t need to.

I feel a little guilty that I’m not using my time more “productively”, but the truth is I don’t really feel any real urgency to do so. For my entire life I’ve been working towards something, some goal; going to school, getting out of school, trying to hide in the military, trying to get out, learning a trade, getting a good job, finding a better job, rebuilding my career after a layoff, playing the office political wars…it goes on.

I don’t have time for that now. I’m not doing it any more. I’m resting. And even though I know it won’t last forever, I’m just going to settle down in my favorite bar stool and order another drink while I still can. I might even light up a smoke! Yes I feel a little guilty, maybe a bit surprised, certainly out of place. Encuero con las manos en los bolsillos. (Naked with your hands in your pockets.) But I’m getting used to it, and its not all that bad. Our culture seems to demand we be constantly at war with the universe. Well, I’m declaring a unilateral peace. I’m not going to save the world, the world doesn’t care. It doesn’t even know I’m here. And it probably doesn’t need saving anyway.

Yes, the poem is an original. Its my farewell to all my old hippy friends. Damn, we were fools, weren’t we?

I’ve wrestled with all of that, too, and wondered how I could make sense of the winding down. And I’ve found part of an answer.

One of my projects I started much earlier, thank God, has been to identify people in my life who were influential. I’ve written them thanking them for their care. When they haven’t been available, I”ve semt the letter to their children.

I’m an acknowledged expert in several areas. These are complex, and I’m trying to explain my philosophy and approach, taking into account personality types and traits. That’s been fun and maybe my experience won’t go to waste. Putting things in terms others can understand and find interesting is the challenge after a while.

We have to give our own lives meaning. NO one is going to do it for us. and it’s a real challenge.

For someone who’s dropped well over a million words on this board in the past few years.

You can choose what mark to leave posterity. Is this place going to be all of it, and these posts your only banner? And even then only until the next disc crash?

It’s like Daniel Webster spending his life at “Cheers.”

That poem is original, isn’t it.

It is said that Caesar sent a legion
deep into the heart of Asia.
They never came back;
perhaps fighting to the last,
a broken square on some dusty plain.

Others say they simply melted
into the earth, their children now
speaking strange tongues and
wearing foreign garb. Or slaves,
toiling under a cruel foreign sun.

We too once marched too far East,
sought the rising sun, the world ocean,
the mountains at the edge of the earth,
the deserts of our disappointment,
the endless forests of our failures.

Our campfires are dimmer now,
and getting fewer every day.
Some of us have fallen by the wayside,
peaceful where we came to conquer.
Fellow exiles now, no longer comrades.

Occasionally we even meet.
But we soon recognize each other.
We were beaten, but we fought like demons.
And we planted our banners deep
in the Eye of the Beast.

It’s not hard to get a book out there nowadays, and your family history would probably make a better book than most, never mind your own experiences with sailing and other things.

You have to see the irony that your grandfather’s story is already down here now as data that might outlive you. Just get it to a venue that has a little more exposure and durability than this one.

I’ve published my own books, and would be happy to advise on the gritty details of publishing. I even know a non-fiction publisher that likes this sort of thing. Or work it out yourself. It’s not hard.

But you have to sit down and write the damn things.